I really do have to wonder if this was tested on any stroke survivors at all. That glove would be almost impossible for any survivor with finger spasticity to get on without at least 3 therapists and popsicle sticks. No help for the thumb.
http://columbiaspectator.com/news/2016/02/25/columbia-professors-develop-robotic-glove-help-stroke-victims-recover
Nearly 800,000 people suffer from strokes every year, making it the leading cause of long-term disability in the United States.
Strokes can often lead to impaired hand function due to loss of blood flow to areas of the brain.
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To
help address this, rehabilitation and regenerative medicine professor
Joel Stein and mechanical engineering professor Matei Ciocarlie are
combining their respective expertise in medicine and robotics to create MyHand, a glovelike device that aims to rehabilitate stroke survivors who have lost function in their hands.
The glove, currently in its prototype stage, is being funded by a Columbia-Coulter research partnership and a National Science Foundation award. Ciocarlie was also recently a recipient of the Sloan Research Fellowship, an award that commends early-career scientists and provides grant money to further their research.
Traditionally,
stroke survivors with impaired hand function have turned to physical
therapists to help them regain hand function. However, limited therapy
resources and failure to exercise enough often pose major challenges to
full recovery.
MyHand seeks to overcome those challenges
by assisting stroke survivors with their rehabilitation exercises and
overall hand motion. Stein and Ciocarlie's device is a portable,
lightweight glove that uses artificial tendons to assist the user’s hand
movement by helping them make grasping motions and other hand movements
that would otherwise be difficult or impossible(Sorry, this looks like it might help grasp in the lower picture but the upper picture doesn't look like it helps grasping at all).
The hope is that MyHand would speed up recovery time by allowing people to do more exercises on their own, in their own time.
“If
the task is to pick up objects … and you can’t actually pick them up
quickly, you’ll get frustrated and call it a day,” Stein said. “But a
device that can help you complete the task then gives you reason to keep
at it and keep practicing—and hopefully, ultimately, not need the
device.”
To successfully aid stroke survivors in these
everyday tasks, MyHand must be both versatile and wearable. From an
engineering perspective, the device has to be able to assist the many
joints and digits of the hand while using very few motors to reduce
weight and clunkiness.
“You don’t want a big, massive
device that, you know, somebody sits down next to and then gets hooked
up to,” Ciocarlie said. “You want something that the person can use in
their kitchen, or in their living room.”
Currently,
Stein and Ciocarlie are testing their prototypes on patients at the
Columbia University Medical Center. There, the researchers are
troubleshooting potential issues, such as correctly positioning the
glove on the wrist and making sure the patient can take the glove on and
off.
Stein and Ciocarlie are also working on finding
the target population that would best benefit from the device. Those
with hand impairment often exhibit different levels of impediment
brought upon by their stroke, ranging from slightly slowed movements to
complete immobility.
“There’s a sweet spot in terms of
this type of technology. Some people don’t need it, some people can’t
benefit from it, and some people can’t really tolerate it, or it’s too
difficult for them to use,” Stein said. “To try to find the best
population, the most targeted, the most likely to benefit population, is
part of what we’ve been working on.”
Though MyHand is
still in its prototype stage, both Stein and Ciocarlie discussed the
untapped potential that such collaborations between engineering and
medicine stand to offer.
“It’s interesting—it’s a good,
deep problem to work on,” Ciocarlie said. “We won’t run out of
scientific challenges anytime soon.”
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